<span style="color: #000000"> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-adds...dist=beforebell (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-adds-80000-jobs-in-june-jobless-rate-82-2012-07-06?dist=beforebell)
<span style='font-size: 23pt'>U.S. adds 80,000 jobs in June; jobless rate 8.2%</span>
WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) - The U.S. added a meager 80,000 jobs in June, the government reported Friday, falling short of market expectations and confirming that the labor market cooled off considerably in the second quarter. Economists surveyed by MarketWatch expected a 100,000 increase. The unemployment rate, meanwhile, was unchanged at 8.2%. Employment gains for May and April were basically unchanged. The number of new jobs created in May was revised up to 77,000 from an original estimate of 69,000, while April's figure was revised down to 68,000 from 77,000. The biggest gains in June occurred in the fields of professional services (47,000), health care (13,000) and manufacturing (11,000). Yet the private sector only added 84,000 jobs in total. The average workweek last month rose 0.1 hour to 34.5, while average hourly earnings climbed 6 cents to $23.50.

<span style="color: #000000">Unemployment for blacks surged to 14.4 percent — the highest level of 2012 and up from 13.6 percent in May — while the 11.0 percent rate for Latinos was unchanged over May but also at a high for the year.</span>

http://www.cnbc.com/id/48092010

Gayle in MD

07-06-2012, 11:08 PM

The price of Republican obstruction has been devastating.

But, we aren't losing over 800,000 jobs a month, like we were under Bush, even with all of the Republican obstruction for political gains.

It's going to blow up right in their faces, too.

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Quote:</div><div class="ubbcode-body"> <span style='font-size: 11pt'>1. Filibustering the American Jobs Act. Last October, Senate Republicans killed a jobs bill proposed by President Obama that would have pumped $447 billion into the economy. Multiple economic analysts predicted the bill would add around two million jobs and hailed it as defense against a double-dip recession. The Congressional Budget Office also scored it as a net deficit reducer over ten years, and the American public supported the bill.

2. Stonewalling monetary stimulus. The Federal Reserve can do enormous good for a depressed economy through more aggressive monetary stimulus, and by tolerating a temporarily higher level of inflation. But with everything from Ron Paul’s anti-inflationary crusade to Rick Perry threatening to lynch Chairman Ben Bernanke, Republicans have browbeaten the Fed into not going down this path. Most damagingly, the GOP repeatedly held up President Obama’s nominations to the Federal Reserve Board during the critical months of the recession, leaving the board without the institutional clout it needed to help the economy.

3. Threatening a debt default. Even though the country didn’t actually hit its debt ceiling last summer, the Republican threat to default on the United States’ outstanding obligations was sufficient to spook financial markets and do real damage to the economy.

4. Cutting discretionary spending in the debt ceiling deal. The deal the GOP extracted as the price for avoiding default imposed around $900 billion in cuts over ten years. It included $30.5 billion in discretionary cuts in 2012 alone, costing the country 0.3 percent in economic growth and 323,000 jobs, according to estimates from the Economic Policy Institute. Starting in 2013, the deal will trigger another $1.2 trillion in cuts over ten years.

5. Cutting discretionary spending in the budget deal. While not as cataclysmic as the debt ceiling brinksmanship, Republicans also threatened a shutdown of the government in early 2011 if cuts were not made to that year’s budget. The deal they struck with the White House cut $38 billion from food stamps, health, education, law enforcement, and low-income programs among others, while sparing defense almost entirely.

There have also been a few near-misses, in which the GOP almost prevented help from coming to the economy. The Republicans in the House delayed a transportation bill that saved as many as 1.9 million jobs. House Committees run by the GOP have passed proposals aimed at cutting billions from food stamps, and the party has repeatedly threatened to kill extensions of unemployment insurance and cuts to the payroll tax.

I'm not going to blame President Obama for this. He clearly wanted something more. But I will second this from Noam Scheiber, who notes that the private sector isn't actually fine and something more must be done:

The upshot is that we’re no longer in a world where sending states a few tens of billions of dollars to shore up their finances is going to get the recovery on track. The economy, by which I mean the private sector, is disconcertingly weak, and strengthening it is going to take something on the order of several-hundred-billion dollars.

The good news is that Obama actually has a plan of roughly that magnitude—the $450 billion American Jobs Act he proposed last September, replete with new payroll tax cuts and additional aid for the unemployed. The bad news is that, in the vein of his “private sector is doing fine” comment, we’ve heard remarkably little about this package in recent months. I’m not sure if that’s because Team Obama believes focusing on it would draw attention to how fragile the economy is at an inconvenient time in the political cycle. Or because, after three plus years of intransigence, Obama has calculated that Republicans aren’t going to abruptly drop their deal-breaking opposition. But, regardless, I think it’s the wrong strategy.

One theme that runs through numerous White House missteps these last few years is the impulse to game out what the political constraints will allow, then proceed within them, rather than start with the optimal policy and fight for as much as they can get. (The major exception was the Jobs Act … before it was shelved.) But with the unemployment rate stuck above eight percent only four months before Election Day, maybe the latter is worth a shot. Sometimes good policy really is the best politics.
To those who believe the bully pulpit is a joke and that elections are entirely decided based upon how much cash individual voters have in their pocket when they step into the voting booth, this might not be persuasive. But if you think that people do tune in to what candidates are saying at some point in the cycle and are able to reason at all, it might help at the margins if the Obama campaign went back into "it's a do-nothing-congress, pass my jobs bill" mode. I'm fairly sure it couldn't hurt.

And who knows? Maybe educating the public a little bit about economics in the process might just help the country stave off know-nothing austerity in the future. Again, fairly sure it won't hurt.

The economy added 80,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department reported Friday, after a revised increase of 77,000 in May. The unemployment rate remained at 8.2 percent.

Economists are expecting tepid job growth for the rest of the year, too.

“This economy has no forward momentum and little help from monetary or fiscal policy,” Kathy Bostjancic, director of macroeconomic analysis for the Conference Board, said. “As if that were not enough, ill winds are blowing in from both a contracting Europe and slowing growth in emerging markets. Also, domestic lawmakers’ inaction on the upcoming ‘fiscal cliff’ creates uncertainty that is not conducive to hiring.”

That report was evidently too straightforward for the Fox & Friends gang, who desperately tried to make it into a terrible thing. Media Matters does a good job of debunking that, if you care.

As to the "uncertainty," one might look to Congress to take some serious action on that. After all, they've had the President's proposal for job creation for nearly a year. You remember the American Jobs Act, right? The one that proposed hiring teachers, firefighters and policemen, modernizing schools, expanding infrastructure?

That would be the same American Jobs Act Eric Cantor declared dead on arrival, because he and his merry band of extremist Congressmen are treasonous self-dealing dictatorial idiots.

The report gave Mitt Romney the opportunity to claim that the report was a "kick in the gut for the middle class," blaming it all on President Obama's policies while giving Congress a complete pass. The man who wants to be President should maybe study up on the separation of powers, and also what has been going on over the past couple of years.

Dave Weigel:

Amid all the verbs and gerunds expressing disappointment, Eric Cantor gives us a sort of heads-up about how Congress will respond.

In the coming weeks, the House will vote to stop the tax hike on working families and remove the red tape burdening small businesses to reduce uncertainty and make America more competitive.

What this means, functionally: The House will hold yet another vote on full repeal of the Affordable Care Act. It will pass, and die in the Senate. Tread carefully. After that vote, you don't want to be mobbed on the street by newly certainty-infused people offering you jobs.

Yes, that. Exactly. I'm certain there will be a thousand or more votes defunding Planned Parenthood and banning abortion too. Those are true job creators.

Here are the facts. There is uncertainty in the economy right now because on January 1, 2013 two things will happen. The sequester will take hold causing automatic cuts to defense spending and other programs, and the Bush tax cuts will expire.

At one point in time, it was reasonable to expect the Congress to take action on these items, because that is what responsible elected officials do. However, we currently have a Congress full of irresponsible Republican idealogues who value their pledge to Grover over their oath of office, so all bets are off for everyone but the cottage industry devoted to yet another repeal vote on the Affordable Care Act.

Digby has a great list of what this do-nothing merry band of idiots is doing to our economy. Bookmark it.